AWS Expands Lightsail's Global Availability

Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced that it has greatly expanded access to its Amazon Lightsail virtual private server (VPS) solution.

Until recently, Lightsail, which launched at last fall's re:Invent conference, had been available only in AWS' Northern Virginia region. That changed last month, however, with AWS expanding support to nine additional regions around the world.

According to a blog post Wednesday by AWS evangelist Jeff Barr, in addition to Northern Virginia, Lightsail is now available out of the Oregon, Ohio, London, Frankfurt, Ireland, Mumbai, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney regions.

The company has also revamped the Lightsail console to reflect the availability expansion, letting users easily manage resources scattered across different regions.

For example, users can view all of their static IP addresses and instances on a single pane, regardless of region. They can also search for resources within specific regions or across all applicable regions.

Lightsail, which competes with similar services from hosting providers like Linode, Vultr and DigitalOcean, enables developers to quickly and cheaply launch VPSes on the AWS cloud. Users can pick from one of five plans with pre-configured levels of memory, vCPU capacity and data transfer rates, all priced between $5 and $80 per month.

"Lightsail takes care of the heavy lifting and gives you a simple way to build and host applications," Barr said. "[Y]ou can choose a configuration from a menu and launch a virtual machine preconfigured with SSD-based storage, DNS management, and a static IP address."

About the Author

Gladys Rama is the senior site producer for RCPmag.com and senior editor of AWSInsider.net.